Well, it’s time to close the books on January. All in all, January 2018 was a good month for the Awful Avalanche Marketing and Critical Content team, pictured here in all their buff glory:

Okay, so technically Page Views went down – from 7,488 (December) to 6,159. But that’s okay, because the number of Distinct Visitors, the metric I care about more, went up, from 3,446 to 3,507. A few more readers here and there, and I love and appreciate each and every one of you! (Except for that one guy, who I don’t like….)

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Next: My standard disclaimer:

Your Privacy is Important to Me: WordPress calculates who is a distinct person by their I.P. address. It also uses the I.P. address to deduce which country you live in. I myself can’t see I.P. addresses unless you leave a comment. In which case I can see your email address; and from that I COULD look up your I.P. if I were curious, which I am not.

Next: Before posting my usual “Parade of Nations”, this here is my nostalgic trip down memory lane. In which I narcissistically “look-back” through my own posts of the last month, self-assess them, and highlight a few which I think are particularly good, I call this feature:

Highlights of the Month

So, here we go, in chronological order:

My first real post for January was this human-interest piece involving Ukrainians and trains. It was somewhat popular and was picked up by Johnson’s Russia List, probably because it was a straight translation piece.

Next I started this long 6-part series, which maybe wasn’t as popular (because it’s just dry old history), but I think was pretty good. It’s a review of a piece by Dmitry Lyskov, who attempts to set the record straight about the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Speaking of which, I may just do another one of his oeuvres in February, this time taking up the issue about the number of Russians killed in the (Russian) Civil War.

Next, my marketing team came up with the idea for getting people to click on this piece, due to the sensationalistic headline about female reporters being forced to take off their blouses! Response was mild, showing a jaded public seeking bigger thrills than that.

In which case, yes, I went there, with this 4-parter on gay marriage in Russia (or its lack thereof). Reader interest picked up. And with that, I closed the month.

But now it is time for that Pomp and Circumstance that everybody has been waiting for: Time to march on with the

Parade Of Nations

My 3,507 January visitors hail from the following countries, in order of most to least page views. WordPress allows me to save these stats as a CSV file, from which I copy-pasted onto here: